From Emerging Talent to Future-Facing Leadership

Context

A leading health solutions company of roughly 300,000 employees, whose business spans retail pharmacy and health insurance, has collaborated with WDHB since 2024 on one of their flagship emerging talent programs. Targeting recent university graduates, this 3.5-year rotational program moves 25-40 emerging leaders through multiple parts of the organization before participants secure post-program roles. The program was established with then-CEO sponsorship, and has maintained a high level of senior leader support. 

When the organization’s Talent Development Leader stepped into her role, she noticed some early signals in her inbox that pointed to opportunities to strengthen the program:

• Retention that dipped most where it mattered — close to program completion, just as years of investment were about to pay off
• An opportunity to add a formal celebratory event marking the culmination of what participants had learned, experienced, and developed during the program 

The Talent Development Leader approached WDHB with two key ambitions for the program. The first was to give participants a window into how leadership, innovation, and culture transformation work in leading organizations beyond their own, especially since the program recruits directly from universities and many participants have only experienced one way of working. The second was to mark the end of their 3.5-year journey in a way that reflects the spirit of the company’s culture. 

“We were trying to solve this problem of: how do we give them exposure to how other people think and how other people operate that isn’t just ‘our way’ — which is probably all they know.”
– Talent Development Leader

The overall goal has been to reinforce the organization’s continued investment in its emerging leaders through an innovative culminating experience, while equipping this talent with the insights and executive development needed to future-proof the organization. 

The solution we designed:

Grounded in our Threaded Learning^® methodology (WDHB’s experiential learning design), we designed a Learning Expedition that serves as the capstone experience of the talent program. 

A learning journey design that holds, while its contents change. While three key themes related to culture, innovation, and growing with digitalization anchored the design across cohorts, what sits inside those themes is consistently rebuilt each cycle, together with the client, based on the current realities of the business environment. For instance, when the company entered a period of transformation , resilience and navigating disruption became a key focus. 

Exposure chosen for otherness, relevance, and authenticity. Participants have the chance to spend time with organizations outside healthcare: global technology companies, a leading design firm, startups, and non-profit organizations. Participants consistently named the contrast itself as something that moved them. WDHB carefully curates sessions with speakers who share their own authentic experiences — the first principle at the core of Threaded Learning.

A question many talent leaders consider, and one our client explored early on, is how exposure to other organizations affects high-potential emerging talent. What we’ve seen across our work is that exposure signals investment, and limiting it can signal the opposite. The Talent Development Leader now shares this perspective when colleagues in other departments ask about Learning Expeditions.

“If a single visit to another company were the deciding factor for someone’s decision to stay, that would point to something deeper worth looking at. I see exposure as a strength for retention: it broadens perspective and shows people we’re invested in them.”
– Talent Development Leader

Threaded Learning’s second principle — Otherness, or intentionally including differing perspectives — gives the participants a new lens for which to see their challenges. Not only do company visits increase their feelings of belonging, but they bring back new ways of thinking, problem-solving, and leadership capability-building to the client after every Learning Expedition.

Structured reflection between every exposure. In leveraging Reflection — another principle in Threaded Learning’s core — we design multiple facilitated debriefing sessions to convert what participants see into something they can name and use. This is among the most consistently praised parts of the design. Participants continually describe the WDHB facilitation as simple but effective and routinely ask to take the reflection materials back to work with them.

A graduation ceremony worthy of the last 3.5 years. WDHB designed a celebration that sends each cohort off with a bang, from a master of ceremony, to a collection of the group’s memories over the years, special mementos, and curated experiences. No detail forgotten.

A bridge back to the workplace. With our client, WDHB co-designed a reflection guide for participants’ direct managers, shared in advance of each cohort’s return. The guide prepares managers for a follow-up conversation with participants as each class graduates, helping the Conversation principle in Threaded Learning extend well beyond the learning expedition and supporting the transfer of knowledge, skills, and mindsets across the organization. 

What it produces:

Participants rated the experience among the most valuable of their careers so far. On average, cohorts rate the Learning Expedition at a 9.4/10, the relevance to their roles and current challenges at 9.3, with a Net Promoter Score of 96/100. Participants describe the Learning Expedition as the most meaningful curriculum item in their program journey. 

The insight is specific enough to be actionable. On average, participants rate their likelihood of adopting new ways of thinking at 9.2/10 and of driving new initiatives or changing existing plans at 9.0. The client has observed stronger participant engagement and team cohesion, along with a greater openness among participants to show up authentically throughout the program. Following graduation from the program, each cohort brings back the leadership identity development they learned from the program back to the workplace, with one graduating noting that the Learning Expedition taught them how to “actually influence, lead, and embrace change across a [their] company.”

The cohort leaves as a network. After graduation, each class of participants disperse across the company, many landing in differing business units. They consistently describe the shared experience — the sessions, the meals, the transfers, the city — as the thing that turns a set of colleagues into people they will continue to trust throughout their careers. Alumni often return to speak with the following cohort, outlining what they still use in their work years later. 

Other parts of the organization have started asking for it. While the experience began with one specific program,  it has since expanded to another emerging talent leadership development program with other programs part of the portfolio expressing interest. 

Alumni retention now sits at around 90%. Since the partnership began, alongside broader changes the client made to the program, retention of program graduates has risen to roughly 90%, a result the Talent Development Leader is proud of given initial retention statistics  benchmarks and today’s evolving world of work. The client routinely sees the Learning Expedition as one of the biggest drivers: participants now have something to look forward to that culminates their journey and equips them with a final piece of learning in the program before graduation. 

A strong, embedded culture partnership. Over the years, the person responsible for the program has changed. Each outgoing program owner has brought their successor onto a live expedition before handing over, so the institutional memory transfers through shared experience. The client describes the relationship as distinct from typical vendor arrangements: every experience is tailored rather than off-the-shelf, and feedback flows in both directions — required of a trusted transformation partner. 

“You could tell it’s not a cookie-cutter experience… It wasn’t ‘here are offerings, pick and choose.’ It was very personal, very tailored. And I felt that from the moment we started working with WDHB.” — Talent Development Leader